careful what you wish for. I also like silence. But I'd rather use noise cancelling headphones than work in the booth among thousands other booths.
It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".
I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.
Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?
If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.
But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play... it's bizarre that so many peers either:
(1) argue in favor of open floor plans ("More collaborative! More fun! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(2) argue in favor of work-from-home ("More productive! Less distractions! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(3) both, from one sentence to the next.
Open floor plans and work from home are POLAR OPPOSITES. The only thing they have in common is that they're both "not cubes". So it's bizarre to me that there aren't more moderate voices calling for on-prem workplaces of higher quality.
If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.
If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.
Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.
Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.